Philosophers have recently argued that traditional discussions of virtue and character presuppose an account of behaviour that experimental psychology has shown to be false. Behaviour does not issue from global traits such as prudence, temperance, courage, or fairness, they claim, but from local traits such as sailing-in-rough-weather-with-friends-courage and office-party-temperance. The data e...

Virtue theories have become influential in ethics and epistemology. This paper argues for a similar approach to argumentation. Several potential obstacles to virtue theories in general, and to this new application in particular, are considered and rejected. A first attempt is made at a survey of argumentational virtues, and finally it is argued that the dialectical nature of argumentation makes...

But beginning with his work in the late 1970s, Sosa takes a different approach to the debate between foundationalists and coherentists over the structure of knowledge. (Indeed, Sosa takes this different approach to a number of long-standing disputes in philosophy.) Rather than assuming the sides are talking past one another, Sosa suggests that each side has identi fi ed part of the truth, but m...

T he dominant trend in contemporary medical ethics describes ethical behavior in terms of the principles and rules that must be followed to bring it about, most notably nonmaleficence, beneficence, justice, and respect for autonomy. An alternative approach to ethics, virtue ethics, emphasizes not principles and rules, but rather the virtues, or characteristics, whose exercise will bring about e...

Virtue ethics is often proposed as a third way in health-care ethics, that while consequentialism and deontology focus on action guidelines, virtue focuses on character; all three aim to help agents discern morally right action although virtue seems to have least to contribute to political issues, such as austerity. I claim: (1) This is a bad way to characterize virtue ethics. The 20th century ...

TODAY it is my privilege to address you on behalf of my colleagues on the medical staff of the Royal. The giving of an oration, as it is now called, at the beginning of the winter term, is sanctified by a tradition extending backward in time for more than 150 years. It is customary to welcome, in particular, those of you who have recently begun their clinical studies, and this I do with great p...